Page 175

I’m sorry Ada

FORTY-ONE

Ada hadn’t wanted to hurt Sadie by telling her who she was with. She had thought maybe a little hurt was due but she hadn’t intended to cause it. There had been no rules between them, she always knew that, but there was still something like disappointment getting through to her from Sadie’s messages. Or maybe that was her own disappointment reflected. She wondered if she would have ended things with Sadie like she had planned when she was in Florida if Sadie hadn’t preempted her. She wondered if she would have done it all differently from the start if she’d known she didn’t even have Sadie until October, that Sadie could in fact find another bed as easily as she’d found Ada’s. She wondered what would have happened if she’d let Sadie stay in the living room that first night and if Sadie had ever thought there was a chance she might.

But she couldn’t worry about Sadie any longer because she needed to cook this crumbled-up tofu in batches so she didn’t crowd the wok that Rob surprisingly had sitting on top of his fridge. The oil was spitting at her and she hung a tea towel over her dress, draped like a bib. She was grateful that Stuart would have to text her to get in because she felt she was slipping from charmingly bedraggled into mess territory. She finished the frying and set the tofu aside, inhaling the smell of sesame filling the increasingly sweaty kitchen.

The alarm on her phone went off, breaking through her playlist. She’d set it for the time Stuart’s train was due. She turned the heat down on the stove and ran to the bathroom, splashing water on her face and flapping her dress to get air underneath it. She grabbed her bra from the floor and put it back on without taking her dress off then looked in the mirror and pulled out her hair elastic so her hair fell down in kinky damp bunches. She considered it, tied it back up and went back to the kitchen.

She was slowly pan-frying the vegetables, keeping the heat low so that she could dump everything in there and have it fresh and perfect when Stuart arrived. She decided to cook the dumplings after they’d eaten the noodles and the eggplants, maybe have a second dinner round nine thirty or ten, maybe in Rob’s bed (though better not leave grease stains). She took deep breaths then when that didn’t work she got a grapefruit IPA out of the fridge, opened the can and drank a mouthful. Ten minutes passed and then fifteen and she waited for Stuart.

At the half-hour point, Ada turned the wok off entirely and watched the carrot strips and greens wilt down into an oily mound in the centre. She messaged Stuart asking if he was lost and when he didn’t reply she messaged again telling him not to bother buying drinks, she had them covered. She carried her phone back to the stove and stood staring at it, then at the wok, then back at the phone as she finished her beer. She waited ten minutes and then messaged him again saying she was getting worried now, had something happened on the train?

Ada knew this next move was silly but she went to the Guardian website thinking a train crash would be news. For one moment she saw a headline that she thought was it and then her brain slowed down enough to recognise that it said something about nursing training, NHS shortages, everything concerning, but nothing concerning her. A shameful part of her realised there had been a brief spot of relief when she had thought Stuart was caught up in a catastrophe, because if he wasn’t then the catastrophe was only hers.

Ada thought that this was why people used labels for their relationships, probably. Because what if Stuart did die and she had to account for herself in the circles of grief? His housemates knew her and his brother had heard her name but where would she sit at the funeral and would she be invited to the wake and what would she say on Facebook with no photos of them together to share and very few mutual friends? And who would comfort her? Who knew them both and who recognised her feelings as real? Yeah, this was why people said ‘boyfriend’, and even more why they said ‘husband’, because then their grandmother understood and so did bank managers and so did her friends from high school who she hadn’t spoken to in years but still posted happy birthday with a little kiss.

Ada realised she had started convincing herself that her lover was dead and felt light-headed and insane and so she messaged him saying, ‘Are you dead? You’re like an hour late.’ He hadn’t seen any of her recent messages, nothing since he would have got on the train. On the first of three trains, she reminded herself. One journey, two changes, not like her direct run. So then she started imagining what might have happened in London or in Hove, the kind of smaller crimes that wouldn’t hit the Guardian, a mugging or a beating or a fall down an escalator.

Or maybe he had lost his phone, left it on one of the earlier trains and now he was walking through Brighton trying to remember the address. She willed him to remember her phone number then realised that was pointless, an impossible ask, and so she willed him to go to an internet cafe – did they still exist? – and log on, message her, and she could come and collect him. And if he’d lost his phone, maybe she could put her phone away for two days too and they could unplug and embrace their solitude.

Ada had turned off the oven but now she put it back on, low, so the eggplants would be warm when he arrived, which she felt sure, now she’d figured out the phone-losing thing, he would do. He should have been there an hour ago and then he should have been there two hours ago and he hadn’t looked at any of her messages and she was looking, checking, every couple of minutes for the double blue tick. They’d been delivered and she googled ‘messages delivered phone broken’ and saw that if his phone was fully broken then no, the messages wouldn’t get there, so she ruled that out of her speculation.

Ada poked at the cooled damp vegetable mush at the bottom of the wok and decided she needed to eat her serve, she’d had a beer and no food since breakfast and she couldn’t be seeing things clearly. So she heated up the wok again and separated the carrots from the greens as best she could. She put the tofu back in, then the cooked noodles, and she stirred it all together, letting it heat through. She poured her sauce over, hoisin and soy and white pepper from Rob’s spice rack and other things, she couldn’t remember exactly what she’d mixed in there so many hours ago and then when everything was hot and sticky she served it into two bowls and put a paper towel over one.

She sat down on the floor of the kitchen and picked up a noodle between her fingers and squashed it into her mouth. She did this a few more times before she was sated enough to find chopsticks and then she sat with her knees pulled up near her mouth, her bowl balancing as she picked up the noodles one by one and devoured them. She pulled out the eggplants, nearly black but, she knew, gooey inside. She tore at one with two forks, pulling it apart so it opened to reveal the creamy middle and she ate until her stomach felt hard and hot.

Ada picked up her phone again and checked, saw no blue ticks, and felt a little sick. She got another beer from the fridge, a double IPA that she knew would make her feel the tired kind of drunk and opened it, took a sip then gagged over the sink. It was too much, too strong, and she needed some clarity.

She opened her Facebook app and went to Stuart’s profile. She could message their mutual friends, maybe, there were eight, though no one she knew well. All festival friends who didn’t translate to the rest of the year. They would be confused to hear from her and she didn’t think they could offer her the answers she needed and maybe no one could but how long could she wait here?

At the top of Stuart’s profile was a photo of him and two of his housemates with an ‘about last night’ caption. She checked who’d posted it and, as suspected, it was Paul, who was still in the ‘posting through it’ stage of his break-up, documenting every night out in case his ex-boyfriend was looking. In the photo, Stuart was holding a flight of shots and Paul was kissing his cheek and Tom (Tom?) was either winking or about to pass out. It had been uploaded an hour ago and Ada wasn’t friends with Paul but she thought maybe she could message him anyway, or call him somehow, could you call a Facebook profile?

Then Ada looked underneath the photo and saw that Stuart had liked it and then, while she was looking at it, he commented. A sign of life. A kiss emoji, the one with the little heart in the side of the mouth.

And that didn’t make sense because Stuart was dead, someone had tripped over and pushed him onto the train track, a tragedy that the pusher would never recover from. Or if he wasn’t dead, he was asking strangers to borrow their phone because he’d been mugged between Hove and Brighton, the train was crowded so he couldn’t say who did it but all he knew was his phone was in his pocket when he got on the train and gone when he got off. Or maybe he was at a laptop around the corner, a friend lived in town and he’d remembered their address and oh, thank god, they were in. Could he borrow their laptop? Someone was waiting for him and his phone had died and he’s so stupid, he hadn’t packed a charger. And maybe in this scenario he had opened Facebook and seen the photo of him and quickly liked and commented but any second now he would send her a message and so she waited.

Ada hadn’t messaged Sadie in hours, and she hadn’t messaged Mel at all. Normally Mel would have checked in with her, was she OK, what was it like to see him again but that was missing too. And Ada knew that if she used this, if she told Mel that she had been stood up, or that Stuart was dead and his murderer was using social media to make people think he was still alive, either way, whatever she told Mel, maybe it would make Mel feel so sorry for her that she would forgive Ada for whatever it was Ada had done. Whatever Ada had done that was so unforgivable that she renounced her rights to her despite everything.

But Ada wouldn’t tell Mel and she couldn’t tell Sadie. She had friends, so many friends, since the time she could talk, Ada had had more friends than could easily be invited to a birthday party but she didn’t have anyone she wanted to share this with, this shame, this bloated, sickly loneliness. She thought about wallowing but decided there was something to try first, something that might ease her through the night. She picked up the sour, now too warm beer that she had opened earlier, checked the local time in Florida and FaceTimed Hank.

It rang almost to the point of giving up and then her handsome, large-handed almost brother-in-law answered her call.

‘Ada!’ he said with joy or surprise, probably both, she would accept both.

‘Hi, Hank, I just … wanted to say hello to everyone,’ she said, and he was locking his car and crossing the front lawn. He said he had just got back from work and she said, ‘Oh of course, you’re back in the office!’ and he said yeah, it was awful, all he wanted was to be home with Gabby and Orion all day. He got to the front door and opened it and there was Gabby, standing and holding their baby, and she looked like she’d been crying and Ada wished she hadn’t called.

Hank said, ‘Gabby! Ada called!’ and Gabby looked at the screen, seeming baffled by her little sister’s intrusion into her day. Hank handed Gabby the phone and took Orion and said, ‘Show her the baby!’ So Gabby, who still hadn’t said anything, held the phone close to Orion’s rounding face and Ada said, ‘Hi my little dude’ and Orion blinked and grimaced and she felt grief at how he’d changed and how he would keep on changing.

Hank said, ‘Does he need a new diaper?’ and Gabby said, ‘Yeah, but he just went when I heard you pulling up,’ and Hank said, ‘A likely story!’ but cheerfully, like he said everything. He took Orion to another room. Gabby flopped on the couch and held the phone up to her face and spoke to Ada for the first time.

‘Why did you call Hank?’ she asked and before Ada could answer – how would Ada answer? – she said, ‘I would have picked up if you’d called me.’ It was close, too close, to acknowledging things about them and Ada felt that the baby or the exhaustion had pulled down too many of Gabby’s walls. They were unsafe now.

But Ada said, ‘I thought you might be sleeping,’ and Gabby laughed and it was a bad sound but she said, ‘How are you?’ Then she squinted past Ada and said, ‘And where are you? That’s not your room, right?’ Ada said she was in Brighton and then said, ‘I’m on a sort of … mini break with this guy I’m seeing,’ and Gabby said that sounded nice and Ada agreed that it did. She asked about Orion’s feeding and his sleeping and Gabby was specific about both and then she heard the baby crying from another room. Gabby said, ‘I’m sorry, I have to get him,’ and then, ‘Call again,’ and then she was gone and Ada was on her mini break alone.

Ada only knew the term mini break because of Bridget Jones and she had meant to use it sarcastically but it had come out of her mouth sounding aspirational. She finished her beer, returned to the kitchen and put the bowl of noodles in the fridge. They could be breakfast, she figured, no need to waste them. And maybe Stuart would be here in the morning and they could share them and he would explain.